Canes hockey as a good local citizen Sometimes underestimated is the volume of good things that the Carolina Hurricanes organization does in our local community. The full-time fundraising efforts of the Kids ‘N Community foundation donated $560,000 to 29 children’s charities during the 2016-17 season. The team participates in league-wide initiatives including Hockey Fights Cancer in the fall and You Can Play in February which aims to make NHL hockey inclusive for everyone. And in addition to in-game fundraisers, the team also does a number of other events including the 5K, the golf tourney, skate with the Canes, the 24-hour bike-a-thon and the annual casino night (being replaced by the Hurricanes Bash this year) to name a few. A few of the players themselves have programs both at PNC Arena (renting luxury boxes for a different charity group each game) and away from the game in addition to players’ involvement in community service multiple times per season. The team and the broader Carolina Hurricanes organization deserve a ton of credit for being a good local citizen and supporting many good causes during the course of the Carolina Hurricanes hockey season. St. Baldrick’s Foundation All of these endeavors have merit and it is tremendous that the organization is able to support so many charities, but one of my personal favorites has always been the annual tradition of the team hosting St. Baldrick’s participants at Canes games during the latter part of the season. For those who are not familiar with St. Baldrick’s, the organization is a non-profit that supports research with the goal to “Conquer Childhood Cancers.” You can learn...

Skip below the divider if you just want the on-ice part… Continuing a good run, Sunday provided another beautiful day for Carolina Hurricanes training camp hockey and the fun of the Caniac Carnival. The atmosphere is always phenomenal between the on-ice action but also the inflatables, giveaways food truck and true carnival atmosphere outside. I would like to extend a huge thank you to Ashleigh and Cory at Tenco Coffee for offering a convenient pick up and sale point for Canes and Coffee coffee cups at the Caniac Carnival and also for tremendous locally-roasted Counter Culture coffee to help me power through two practices and a long day. And best part of the day was meeting up with both new and old friends and fellow Caniacs from having a real life Canes and Coffee experience with a small group before the first practice to seeing a few familiar faces to catching a few people carrying Canes and Coffee boxes around to just chatting with the people near me at the practices. I cannot be happier to be a tiny part of a great hockey community! On the ice, the day offered two practices. The first saw a mostly veteran group that included all of surefire NHLers and another 6-8 players who presumably earned the chance to sit at the adults table. The second practice was actually the more interesting. The ‘kids’ practice featured enough scrimmage/real hockey type drills that it provided a great evaluation point for many of the prospects. This article will cover the first practice. I will loop back around either late tonight or otherwise sometime...

Finally! The idea and even process of ordering branded Canes and Coffee coffee has made it into the tinkering stage multiple times but always seemed to find a way to the back burner in favor of another article or something else related to content. But after a few fits and failed starts and after passing the two year anniversary of Canes and Coffee, we FINALLY have namesake coffee mugs. Details are TBD, but I think the general idea is to sell the coffee cups for about $13, and to ship them in away that they arrive in one piece will probably run about $5 locally and probably the rest of the US. With sales tax and shipping, the total should hopefully be less than $20. The risk at this point is now the process of figuring out shipping logistics and setting up a page to take orders takes another two plus years. 🙂 More seriously, the hope is to invest a little bit of time in this over the holiday weekend, get squared away with people who have generously contributed and deserve a small token of our appreciation in return and at the same time set up some kind of simple order page. We would greatly appreciate help with two things: 1) Here is a really short survey that mostly explores the possibility of coming up with a few unique and “local” delivery/pick up options for people in the Raleigh area. 2) If you have contributed $15 or more to Canes and Coffee...

Official launch day – July 29, 2015 July 29, 2017 marks the two-year anniversary of the founding of Canes and Coffee. For the nostalgic types, it is not overly interesting, but here is the launch article from July 29, 2015. More on the ice from the same day, check out my article recapping the Canes 2015 prospect camp. That article had Sebastian Aho ranked first among the forward prospects in the Saturday scrimmage and also raved about (and ranked second in the scrimmage) a mid-round pick who has since risen up the prospect depth chart and could be a dark horse for the 2017-18 opening day roster. THANK YOU! I cannot express enough how thankful I am to everyone who has helped Canes and Coffee at any point over the past two plus years reaching back to the initial fundraiser in June of 2015. —Thank you to everyone who contributed to the launch of Canes and Coffee including Kickstarter contributors (See our Founders’ Page.) and also the numerous people who provided feedback and encouragement when the site was being built and launched. —Thank you to everyone who played a role in getting the site off the ground, especially Rob and Drago at Oak City Tech, Jamie Kellner for providing photos and Marty Smith from Curagami for sharing his insight and experience designing content sites and building online communities. —Thank you to everyone who generously chipped in a few dollars in the spring and early summer to help us remain up and running. –Finally, thank you to everyone in the Carolina Hurricanes hockey community who spends a small part of their...

If you have been away from Canes and Coffee, you can find a complete list of clickable links for the articles posted for this week’s reader/guest article week HERE. With all due respect to the run of three great articles from Canes writers Bob Wage, Ben Pope and Corey Sznajder, the final guest article is probably my favorite of them all. The uncanny ability for passionate fandom to create deep ties to things associated with it When one becomes a passionate fan of a sports team and remains so for an extended period of time, fandom has an uncanny knack for pulling a range of other things into the fan experience. Though I have not been there in 20 years, I can easily imagine being at Arnie’s Doghouse in Whiting, Indiana with my dad before hopping on the expressway up to Comiskey Park to see the Chicago White Sox play. I can close my eyes and hear Jack Brickhouse’s famous call, “That’s a fly ball…deep to left…way back…HEY! HEY!” or Harry Caray’s, “Holy Cow!” for the Chicago Cubs. And I can remember the anticipation building during a cold winter walk across campus at Indiana University with friends on the way to a top 20 match up at Assembly Hall. And now on the verge of 20 years as a Hurricanes fan, I like many others have a number of things deeply attached to my Canes hockey fandom. John Forslund and Chuck Kaiton (especially those who started early when only a little over half of the games were televised) are a deeply entrenched in the Hurricanes hockey experience....

Canes Art provided by Chris Clark. Today Canes and Coffee’s reader and guest website takeover moves forward into its fourth and final day. If you are catching up, reader articles include: David Miller with a deep dive on the Canes salary cap through 2019-20; Randy Yale’s top five plays of the 2016-17 season; Brandon Stanley with his thoughts on the play of the Hurricanes prospects at camp in late June. Guest writer articles include: Bob Wage from Canes Edge writing about the potential attendance benefits of an ownership change; Ben Pope sharing the incredible cool start to his writing career as Mark Jones at the age of 12; Corey Sznajder formerly from The Shutdown Line with a deep statistical dive on the Hurricanes’ blue line. An interview with former Hurricanes anthem singer KK Fritsch. Today’s reader article is courtesy of Craig Johnson and has two sets of three – one of players on the spot and another of rookies who could make the jump. About the Author Craig Johnson (Twitter=@cwjohnson23) grew up in Virginia where he played dangerously thin ice pond hockey on a nearby pond those couple of times a year when it froze over. The Capitals were his team by geography, but they were pretty horrible and tough to follow. Fast forward to 2000 when Craig and his family moved from Wilmington to Raleigh. A good friend took him to a couple of Hurricanes games (his company had killer seats) and Craig was hooked. For the 17 years since, Craig has been an “on again/off again” season ticket holder. He attended every home game...